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WonderHistory

Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519) filled his notebooks with inventions: flying machines, a parachute, an armoured vehicle, a vast stone bridge. Very few were built in his lifetime, and many could not have worked with the materials of his day.

Leonardo kept notes almost daily, and thousands of his pages survive, mixing anatomy, rivers and bird flight with grocery lists. In the short Codex on the Flight of Birds, written around 1505 and now in Turin, he studied how birds use the air and sketched machines to copy them. Some of his ideas have since been tested. In 2000 the British skydiver Adrian Nicholas made a safe descent under a parachute built to Leonardo's pyramid-shaped design. In 1502 Leonardo offered the Ottoman sultan Bayezid II a single stone arch 240 metres long across the Golden Horn in Istanbul. It was never built, but in 2001 a smaller wooden version opened as a footbridge in Ås, Norway, and in 2019 engineers at MIT built a scale model and found that the design would have stood.

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Magna Carta, Latin for “Great Charter”, was sealed by King John of England at Runnymede, beside the Thames, on 15 June 1215 to make peace with rebel barons. It promised swift justice and protection from unlawful imprisonment, and put limits on the king's power in writing.

The peace did not last. Neither side kept its promises, Pope Innocent III annulled the charter in August 1215, and the First Barons' War broke out. After John died in 1216, the advisers ruling for his nine-year-old son, Henry III, reissued a shortened version. It was issued again in 1217 and 1225, and in 1297 Edward I made it part of English statute law. Its most famous clause, number 39 in the 1215 text, promised that no free man would be imprisoned or stripped of his rights except by the lawful judgement of his equals or by the law of the land. Four copies of the 1215 charter survive: two at the British Library, one at Lincoln Castle and one at Salisbury Cathedral. Three of its clauses, as reissued in 1297, are still law in England and Wales.

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The Protestant Reformation spread fast partly thanks to printing. From 1517 onwards Martin Luther's writings came off the presses as short, cheap pamphlets, many of them in German rather than Latin; in the first third of the 16th century, about one in five works printed in Germany was his.

The Reformation was the 16th-century movement that split Western Christianity and created Protestant churches independent of Rome. It is usually dated from 31 October 1517, when Luther, a monk and university teacher in Wittenberg, circulated his Ninety-five Theses against the sale of indulgences, certificates the Church sold to reduce the punishment for sins. A century earlier the Czech reformer Jan Hus had made similar criticisms and was executed in 1415; the historian Lyndal Roper argues that print is the main reason Luther escaped the same fate. Johannes Gutenberg's movable-type printing, developed in the mid-15th century, made short pamphlets cheap, and presses were scattered across many German towns, so no single authority could stop them. Towns with a printing press were more likely to adopt the Reformation. As most people could not read, Luther's friend the painter Lucas Cranach the Elder made woodcut pictures that put his ideas into images.

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WonderScience

In a cave in Jujuy, northern Argentina, archaeologists found two pipes carved from puma bone, with seeds of cebil, a tree whose seeds are psychoactive, lying beside them. Chemical traces inside the pipes point to plant smoking more than 4,000 years ago, among the oldest evidence of such use in South America.

Cebil, Anadenanthera colubrina, is a South American tree whose seeds contain tryptamines, compounds that strongly alter perception; further north in the Andes it is called vilca. The pipes come from Inca Cueva 7, a small rock shelter near the Humahuaca valley at the edge of the high Andean plateau, where seeds of cebil and of mesquite lay in the same layer. Radiocarbon measurements, which gauge how much of the carbon-14 in once-living material has decayed, give ages of about 4,000 years, roughly 2100 BC. The residue shows that a tryptamine-bearing plant was smoked, but it cannot prove exactly which one. Cebil use continued in the region for thousands of years: Wichí healers in northern Argentina still used its seeds, which they call hatáj, in the 1990s.

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WonderScience

About 155,000 species of fungi have been formally described, yet the true number is estimated at 2.2 to 3.8 million. That means more than nine in ten fungal species have never been named.

That range comes from a 2017 review by two fungus specialists, David Hawksworth and Robert Lücking. They combined several lines of evidence: how fast new species are still being described, how often one familiar-looking species turns out to be several once its DNA is checked, and the ratio of fungi to plants at well-studied sites. A 2023 study put the likeliest total at about 2.5 million. Most fungi never form mushrooms. They live as microscopic yeasts or as networks of fine threads called hyphae, in soil, inside plants, in lichens and in water, and many are known only from DNA found in soil or water samples. Around 2,500 new species are named each year; at that pace, scientists at Kew Gardens in London estimate, naming them all would take 750 to 1,000 years.

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In the double-slit experiment, light or particles such as electrons pass through two narrow slits and leave bright and dark bands on a screen, the mark of overlapping waves. If a detector records which slit each particle went through, the bands disappear.

In the early 1800s, Thomas Young shone light through two narrow openings to argue that light is a wave. Where two waves meet crest to crest they reinforce each other, and where a crest meets a trough they cancel out; physicists call this interference. The real surprise came with matter. Claus Jönsson repeated the experiment with electrons in 1961, and in 1974 Italian physicists sent electrons through a similar set-up one at a time. Each landed as a single dot, yet thousands of dots built up the striped pattern. Similar interference has since been seen with molecules of up to 2,000 atoms and, in 2026, with clusters of more than 7,000 sodium atoms. The pattern does not vanish because a person is watching: any physical interaction that records the path, even with no one looking, disturbs the delicate quantum state that produces the interference.

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A lichen is a partnership rather than a single organism. A fungus builds the body and shelters a green alga or a cyanobacterium, a bacterium that makes food from sunlight, and that partner feeds the fungus sugars in return.

For a long time lichens were thought to be single organisms. In 1867 the Swiss botanist Simon Schwendener proposed that a lichen is really a fungus living with algae, and many experts of his day rejected the idea. Lichens were the first partnership for which biologists used the word “symbiosis”, meaning different organisms living closely together. In 2016 a team led by Toby Spribille found that many lichens also contain a yeast, a second kind of fungus, as a third partner. About 20,000 species are known, growing on bark, bare rock, Arctic tundra and even in deserts. People have long made use of them: litmus, the dye in school acid tests, comes from a lichen, and “reindeer moss”, a winter food of reindeer, is a lichen too.

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WonderScience

Coral reefs are built by polyps, tiny animals related to jellyfish. Microscopic algae living inside their tissues turn sunlight into food for them, and together they build some of the richest habitats on Earth.

Each polyp lays down a skeleton of limestone (calcium carbonate) beneath it, and over thousands of years these skeletons pile up into reefs; most living reefs are less than 10,000 years old. The algae inside the polyps, called zooxanthellae, supply up to 90% of the coral's nutrients. Partnerships like this, which recycle nutrients instead of losing them, help explain a puzzle Charles Darwin described in 1842: how reefs can flourish in tropical seas that are poor in nutrients. When the water stays too warm for too long, corals expel their algae and turn white, which is called bleaching. Bleached coral is not yet dead, but it starves if the heat lasts. The fourth global bleaching event, which began in 2023 and was confirmed by the US agency NOAA in April 2024, has affected reefs in at least 82 countries and territories.

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Earth's outer shell is broken into huge plates that move a few centimetres a year, about as fast as fingernails grow. Where they part, new ocean floor forms; where they collide, old floor sinks back into the mantle and mountains rise. This slow movement, plate tectonics, also drives most earthquakes and volcanoes.

The idea that continents move goes back to Alfred Wegener in 1912, but geologists accepted it only in the 1960s, when surveys of the ocean floor showed new crust forming along mid-ocean ridges and spreading away on both sides. Old ocean floor sinks back into the mantle at subduction zones, where one plate dives beneath another. That is why the oldest large areas of ocean floor are only about 180 to 200 million years old, while some continental rocks are about 4 billion years old. Turkey shows the process at work: most of the country sits on the small Anatolian plate, whose edges include the North and East Anatolian Faults. The 1999 İzmit earthquake struck on the first, and the 2023 Turkey–Syria earthquakes on the second.

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Earth's magnetic field deflects most of the solar wind, the stream of charged particles flowing from the Sun, but steers some of them down towards the polar regions. When they hit the thin upper air, it glows as an aurora.

The particles, mostly electrons and protons, are funnelled into two rings around the magnetic poles, called the auroral ovals, and strike oxygen and nitrogen in the upper atmosphere, most often around 100 km up. The atoms and molecules give off the energy they receive as light. Oxygen gives the common green glow and, higher up, a rarer red; nitrogen adds blue and purple lower down. Galileo used the name aurora borealis in 1619, after Aurora, the Roman goddess of the dawn, and Boreas, the Greek god of the north wind; its southern twin is the aurora australis. During strong solar storms the ovals widen and auroras appear far from the poles. In May 2024, in the strongest geomagnetic storm for more than 20 years, they were seen from Spain, Turkey and Cyprus, and even from the Canary Islands.

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WonderScience

Earth spins on an axis tilted about 23.4°, and the tilt gives us the seasons. Over a cycle of about 41,000 years it rocks only between about 22° and 24.5°. The Moon's pull is thought to keep it this steady; without a large moon, the tilt could swing far more, with much bigger shifts in climate.

Even this small rocking matters: it is one of the slow orbital cycles, worked out by the Serbian scientist Milutin Milanković, that help pace the ice ages. The Moon's pull on Earth's slightly bulging equator makes the axis wobble at a steady pace that stays out of step with the tugs of the other planets, so those tugs cannot build up. In 1993 the French astronomer Jacques Laskar and colleagues calculated that without the Moon the tilt could swing chaotically, at times approaching 90°. Later simulations, in 2011, found smaller but still large swings of about 20 to 25°. Mars, which has only two tiny moons, has seen its tilt vary between about 0° and 60° over millions of years.

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WonderScience

Sunlight takes about 8 minutes 20 seconds to cross the 150 million km between the Sun and Earth, so we always see the Sun as it was a little over eight minutes earlier.

Light travels at about 300,000 km per second. The Sun is on average about 150 million km away, so its light takes about 8 minutes 20 seconds to reach us: a little less in early January, when Earth is closest to the Sun, and a little more in early July. The Danish astronomer Ole Rømer showed in 1676 that light takes time to travel. Working in Paris, he noticed that the gaps between eclipses of Io, one of Jupiter's moons, grew longer while Earth was moving away from Jupiter and shorter while it was moving closer, because the light had a longer or shorter distance to cover. The energy in sunlight is far older than eight minutes: it is made in the Sun's core, and working its way out to the surface is estimated to take 10,000 to 170,000 years.

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WonderScience

How hot or cold an object feels depends not only on its temperature but also on how quickly it transfers heat to or from your skin.

Your skin is usually a little over 30°C, warmer than a room at about 20°C. When you touch something, heat flows out of your skin, and the nerve endings that sense warmth and cold respond mainly to how fast that happens. Metals conduct heat extremely well: aluminium, for example, conducts it more than a thousand times better than wood. So a metal handle draws heat from your fingers quickly and feels cold, while a wooden one lets your skin stay warm. Engineers call the property that matters here thermal effusivity: it combines how well a material conducts heat with how much heat it can soak up. The same rule works in reverse: in a sauna at 80°C or more you can sit on a wooden bench, but a metal one at that temperature would burn you. It is also why a tiled floor feels colder underfoot than a rug.

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The smell after rain is partly caused by geosmin, a compound made by soil bacteria and released into the air by falling drops.

The smell of rain has a name: petrichor. The word was introduced in 1964 by the Australian researchers Isabel Joy Bear and Richard Thomas, from the Greek petra, stone, and ichor, the fluid said to flow in the veins of the gods. Part of the scent comes from plant oils that collect in dry soil and rock; another part is geosmin, made by soil bacteria such as Streptomyces. Our noses are extraordinarily sensitive to it: most people can smell it in water at only 6 to 10 parts per trillion. In 2015 researchers at MIT filmed raindrops with high-speed cameras and found that a drop landing on dry, porous ground traps tiny air bubbles, which rise and burst into a fine spray that carries the scent into the air. Geosmin also gives beetroot its earthy taste.

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WonderHistory

In August 1947 British rule in India ended and the land was divided along religious lines into two countries: India, with a Hindu majority, and Pakistan, with a Muslim majority. Between 12 and 20 million people had to leave their homes, in one of the largest migrations in history.

Pakistan became independent on 14 August 1947 and India on 15 August. Pakistan was made of two separate parts with India in between; the eastern part broke away in 1971 and became Bangladesh. Two large provinces with mixed populations, Punjab in the west and Bengal in the east, were split between the new states. The border was drawn by Cyril Radcliffe, a British lawyer who had never been to India and was given about five weeks for the task. It was published only on 17 August, two days after independence, so on independence day many people in the border districts did not know which country they were in. Hindus and Sikhs moved towards India and Muslims towards Pakistan, many on foot or in packed trains. There was terrible violence on both sides; estimates of the dead range from 200,000 to two million.

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WonderArt

In his lifetime Bach was famous as an organist and harpsichord player, and churches invited him to test and open their new organs. He wrote his keyboard music for the organ, the harpsichord and the clavichord. The piano was still a new invention, and the modern concert grand did not yet exist.

The three instruments sound very different. On an organ, air is blown through pipes. On a harpsichord, pressing a key makes a small quill pluck the string, so the player cannot make one note louder than another by touch. On the clavichord, a small brass blade strikes the string and stays against it, which allows fine shading but is too quiet for a hall. The piano, invented by Bartolomeo Cristofori in Florence around 1700, let players play both soft and loud; its full name, pianoforte, means “soft-loud” in Italian. In the 1730s the German builder Gottfried Silbermann showed Bach one of his early pianos. Bach found the high notes too weak. In 1747, at the Potsdam court of Frederick the Great, he improvised on an improved model, and he later helped to sell Silbermann's pianos.

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Johann Sebastian Bach (1685–1750) left more than a thousand surviving works, from church cantatas to keyboard pieces, concertos and chamber music. They are numbered in the BWV catalogue; his first Cello Suite, for example, is known as BWV 1007.

BWV stands for Bach-Werke-Verzeichnis, German for “catalogue of Bach's works”. The musicologist Wolfgang Schmieder published it in 1950 and gave every known piece a number, grouped by type rather than by date: the church cantatas come first, as BWV 1 to 200, and the organ, keyboard, chamber and orchestral works follow. A revised third edition, prepared with the Bach-Archiv in Leipzig, appeared in 2022. Dozens of cantatas are known to be lost, partly because his manuscripts were divided among his sons after his death in 1750, and not all of them looked after their share. After his death most of his music fell out of use, apart from keyboard works studied by musicians such as Mozart and Beethoven, until Felix Mendelssohn revived the St Matthew Passion, Bach's great choral setting of the suffering and death of Jesus, in Berlin in 1829.

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Between June 1724 and March 1725, Bach wrote about 40 cantatas in a row for the churches of Leipzig, one for almost every Sunday and holiday. A cantata is a piece for choir, soloists and orchestra sung during the service, and each of these was built on a well-known Lutheran hymn, using its words and its tune.

Bach became Thomaskantor, the director of church music in Leipzig, in 1723, and in his first year he supplied a cantata almost every week, some adapted from earlier works. For his second year he set himself a plan: each cantata would be built on one Lutheran hymn, or chorale. The opening chorus sets the first verse with the hymn tune in the sopranos, the middle verses are reworded for solo singers, and a plain four-part setting of the last verse closes the piece. The idea may have been inspired by the 200th anniversary of the first Lutheran hymn books, printed in 1524. The series stopped after Palm Sunday 1725, possibly because the writer who reworded the hymns for him, probably Andreas Stübel, had died that January. The Bach scholar Klaus Hofmann has called it the largest musical project Bach ever undertook.

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Artemisia Gentileschi, born in Rome in 1593, was one of the first women in Western Europe to build a successful career as a painter. She painted heroines from the Bible and ancient history, such as Judith and Susanna, as strong women who act, not as decorative figures to be looked at.

Artemisia trained in the workshop of her father, Orazio Gentileschi, a painter influenced by Caravaggio's dramatic use of light, and finished her earliest known painting, Susanna and the Elders, at 17. In 1612 she testified at a public trial in Rome of the painter Agostino Tassi, who had assaulted her; he was found guilty. She then moved to Florence, where in 1616 she became the first woman admitted to the city's Academy of the Arts of Drawing. She later worked in Rome, Venice and Naples, and from 1638 in London at the court of Charles I. Her Judith Slaying Holofernes hangs in the Uffizi in Florence. After her death in Naples, probably in the mid-1650s, she was largely forgotten until the Italian critic Roberto Longhi wrote about her in 1916. In 2020 the National Gallery in London gave her a major exhibition.

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Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519) filled thousands of notebook pages over his life. On a single sheet a study of muscles can sit beside a flying machine, a weapon, notes on flowing water or sketches for a painting. For him, drawing was a way of understanding the world, not only of recording it.

Leonardo wrote most of his notes from right to left in mirror writing; he was left-handed. When he died in France in 1519, he left his papers to his pupil Francesco Melzi. After Melzi's death they were scattered, and in the late 16th century the sculptor Pompeo Leoni cut up some notebooks and mounted the sheets in large albums. The biggest, the Codex Atlanticus (codex is an old word for a bound manuscript), is named after the atlas-sized paper used for mounting. It holds 1,119 sheets dated from 1478 to 1519 and is kept in the Biblioteca Ambrosiana in Milan. Other notebooks are in Paris, London and Madrid, and the Royal Collection at Windsor holds many of his anatomical drawings. The Codex Leicester, his notes on water, rock and light, was bought by Bill Gates in 1994 and is the only major scientific notebook of his in private hands.

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It is often said that Van Gogh sold only one painting in his lifetime, The Red Vineyard. In fact that is just his best-documented sale: the Van Gogh Museum lists several others, and he also traded many works with fellow artists.

The Red Vineyard, painted in Arles in November 1888, was shown at the exhibition of Les XX, an avant-garde artists' group in Brussels, in early 1890. The Belgian painter Anna Boch, sister of Van Gogh's friend Eugène Boch, bought it for 400 francs; it now hangs in the Pushkin Museum in Moscow. The Van Gogh Museum names other sales too. His first commission came from his uncle Cor, an art dealer, who ordered 19 views of The Hague to help him get started. The Paris paint and art dealer Julien Tanguy bought a painting, and his brother Theo sold another work to a gallery in London. Van Gogh also often swapped work with other artists and, when he was younger, for food or painting supplies. Exactly how many works he sold is not known. He died in July 1890, a few months after the Brussels sale.

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WonderArt

Johann Sebastian Bach (1685–1750) was a master of counterpoint: writing several independent melodies that sound at the same time and fit together. In a fugue, one short theme enters again and again in different voices, following strict rules. That precision is why his music can sound mathematical, while it still moves listeners.

Bach's rules could be very strict. In his Goldberg Variations, published in 1741, an opening aria is followed by 30 variations, and every third one is a canon, in which a second voice repeats the first a little later. The gap in pitch between the two voices grows by one step each time, from the same note in variation 3 to nine notes apart in variation 27. In The Art of Fugue, left unfinished at his death, the last fugue brings in a theme that spells his own name in German note letters: B flat, A, C and B natural, written B, A, C, H. After he died his style was thought old-fashioned, yet composers kept studying it; Mozart and Beethoven both learned from his Well-Tempered Clavier. In 1829 the young Felix Mendelssohn conducted the St Matthew Passion in Berlin, starting a wider Bach revival.

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StillnessArt

In 1723 Bach became director of music for the main churches of Leipzig. The job meant a cantata, a piece for choir, soloists and orchestra, for nearly 60 Sundays and feast days a year. In his first year he composed most of them new, week after week, alongside some reworked earlier pieces.

Bach's official title was Thomaskantor, music master of St Thomas School, and he held the post from 1723 until his death in 1750. Each cantata had to suit that Sunday's Bible readings and was performed during the service at St Thomas or St Nicholas church. His first annual cycle began on 30 May 1723; alongside the new works he restaged and adapted some cantatas from his earlier post in Weimar. Music paused for most of Advent and Lent, the quiet seasons before Christmas and Easter. Senior pupils of the school sang in the choir and helped rehearse and copy out the parts by hand. His obituary, written by his son Carl Philipp Emanuel and a former pupil, speaks of five complete annual cycles. More than 200 of his cantatas survive; many others are lost.

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WonderHistory

Johannes Gutenberg's Bible, printed in Mainz in the 1450s, was the first major European book made with movable metal type. Yet it was made to look like a luxury manuscript: its letters imitate scribes' handwriting, colours were added by hand, and about a quarter of the copies were printed on vellum, fine calfskin.

Scholars think Gutenberg printed between 160 and 185 copies, about three-quarters on paper and the rest on vellum. Each page has 42 lines, which is why it is also called the 42-line Bible. To imitate handwriting, his workshop needed 290 different characters, including the joined letter pairs that scribes used. Red headings, known as rubrics, were printed at first but soon left blank for a scribe to add by hand, and buyers had artists paint decorated initials and borders, so no two copies look alike. In March 1455 Enea Silvio Piccolomini, the future Pope Pius II, wrote that he had seen pages on show in Frankfurt. Of the 49 copies that survive in substantial part, a vellum one is on display at the Library of Congress in Washington.

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